How do I best silence a warning about unused variables?

You can put it in "(void)var;" expression (does nothing) so that a compiler sees it is used. This is portable between compilers.

E.g.

void foo(int param1, int param2)
{
    (void)param2;
    bar(param1);
}

Or,

#define UNUSED(expr) do { (void)(expr); } while (0)
...

void foo(int param1, int param2)
{
    UNUSED(param2);
    bar(param1);
}

In GCC and Clang you can use the __attribute__((unused)) preprocessor directive to achieve your goal.
For example:

int foo (__attribute__((unused)) int bar) {
   return 0;
}

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